In order to understand how representative democracy works, it must be researched. The IParl therefore conducts fundamental, realistic and practical research. In various projects, data on the nomination and election of MPs, their work in parliament, representation and other democratic institutions is collected, processed and analysed. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of political processes.
Without candidates, there are no elections. The candidates put forward by the parties therefore fulfil an important function for the success of elections and parliamentary democracy as a whole by giving voters a choice. Within the framework of the Candidate nomination project for the Bundestag, it was analysed who chooses whom to stand as a candidate and why. Building on these findings, the IParl is investigating long-term developments in candidate recruitment in the CandiData project. Do largely the same candidates run in every election or are new people always put forward? What patterns do candidacies follow in the multi-level electoral system of the Federal Republic of Germany? Under what conditions are candidates selected in such a way that they succeed in entering parliament?
Representation - understood in the sense of Ernst Fraenkel as the right and duty to make binding decisions for the community - is the core task of democratic parliaments. At the same time, it emphasises the central role that a parliament plays as a legitimising authority in the political system. This timeless research topic is particularly important in view of the many national and global challenges that parliamentarians and society as a whole are currently facing. As part of the COMPARE research project, IParl is investigating how parliamentary representation functions and succeeds. It is about the perspective of members of parliament from different countries on their roles and functions; we want to find out how they understand and practise representation.
In its first research project, IParl is investigating the nomination of candidates for the 2017 Bundestag elections in the CDU, CSU, SPD, DIE LINKE and BÜNDNIS 90/DIE GRÜNEN, FDP and AfD parties. With the help of quantitative and qualitative methods of empirical political research, the aim is to find out how the nomination procedures are organised, who is running, who decides on the chances of success of a candidacy, which criteria play a role in the nominations, whether and how recruitment differs between and within the parties.
Building on the project on the 2017 candidate nomination, the project examines the temporal organisation of the nomination process in more detail in order to highlight internal party and geographical similarities and differences. Questions of time are questions of power and should therefore not be underestimated in terms of their impact. While analyses of temporal organisation have already been carried out for various government systems and parliaments, they are lacking for the pre-parliamentary and intra-party space. This is all the more surprising given that the people who are recruited in the parties are those who later receive parliamentary mandates and possibly government offices.
Parliamentary groups are the central organisational units of parliamentary politics. This applies to the German Bundestag, which is not characterised as a "parliamentary group parliament" for nothing, as it does to the vast majority of parliaments worldwide. In contrast, the political science debate on parliamentary groups continues to offer great desiderata, which will be addressed in this combined project. The parliamentary group project at the IParl examines three subjects: parliamentary group rules of procedure, parliamentary group changers and parliamentary groups.
Around 40 per cent of parliaments worldwide are bicameral. Second chambers can be found on every continent, in parliamentary and presidential systems of government, in federal and unitary states, in democracies and autocracies: examples include the British House of Lords, the French Senate, the German Bundesrat, the senates in Latin America and the USA. The question of what these second chambers do for the systems of which they are a part is sometimes debated, and sometimes their existence is even questioned. Despite the importance of these debates, second chambers have rarely been at the centre of political science research. The IParl aims to contribute to this discussion with a research project on representation in European second chambers.
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